Hank's Blog

Here’s a joke: three guys go to see this world famous doctor, who says he can cure anyone of anything. He just looks at you, knows what’s wrong, and then he fixes you: magic! Doctor calls the first guy in: “What seems to be the trouble?” Guy says: “I’m sad all the time and I want to kill myself.” Doctor says, “Aha! You’re depressed. Take some Zoloft, see a therapist, get over yourself. Next!” Next guy comes in limping. Doc: “What seems to be the trouble?” Guy says: “I cut my leg and now it’s turning colors and I can’t feel nothing.” Doctor looks at the leg, which is black from the knee down: pus, goo, blood, real nasty stuff. “Aha!” says the doc, “You’ve got gangrene. That leg’s gonna have to come off.” Final guy comes in; doc asks what’s the trouble. Guy says, “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and I’m bleeding from my ears and every orifice.” Doctor looks at the blood trickling out the guys ears, says “Aha! You have Ebola!” Then he prepares a syringe of green liquid — something weird, looks like jello or something — shoots it into the guy’s leg and sends him off: “You’re cured!” The guy wobbles out, still bleeding. Doctor’s nurse hears this and says: “Doctor, what are you doing? There’s no cure for Ebola.” Doctor: “Sure, there is.” Nurse: “What is it?” Doc says, “Death. Call the coroner, would you? I just injected that man with cyanide and he should be dropping over any second now.”

Alright, I’ve been hitting the home front hard in my last few bloggings (or whatever you’d call these), so today you all get a break: no crying babies, no crying parents, no crying. Period. Today, let’s talk about the wheels of justice, and how I ride ‘em like a bicycle.

I’m kind of a big deal.

I think folks around here are finally really waking up to that fact. A guy comes in, barfs up a condom full of coke and tells you how he smuggled it across the border, it don’t take much brains to know to lock him up. But some dealer gets a wild hair and thinks he’s the Einstein of the drug business: that’s the guy that takes a little finesse. And that’s what sets me apart. I’m the goddamn Skell Whisperer, man. I have a gift. I can get inside these dicktards’ heads. I kinda wish I couldn’t. It’s like knowing what a dog’s thinking when he’s trying to figure out how to hide the dump he just took — it doesn’t clean the shit up, it just helps you understand better why it’s smeared all over your Persian rug.

Men should not cry. If you’re crying at one of those movies my wife watches where Ryan Gosling’s looking for true love and it’s World War I or some shit like that — then you’re a pussy. There’s no other way to say it.

Okay, I concede, there are times where, maybe — just maybe — it’s not the same thing as wearing a pair of panties to let yourself cry. I admit it: I’ve cried. It happens. You get hit by life, man, and you’re crying from your bones. True grief-type stuff. That can be man territory, for sure. But in the end, it doesn’t matter if why, or whether you’ve earned it, or what: men aren’t built for crying. It’s bad for them. It takes something out of them that can’t be put back easily. It’s dangerous for a man to cry.

That’s not the same thing for a woman. A woman cries and it passes through her better. It’s clean. This is going to sound sexist to some of you, but it’s like those ads for Drano where they show hairballs and crap built up in the elbow of the drain, and the Drano goes in and flushes it all out. I’m not saying a woman is a clogged sink, but it is kinda like that. There’s something stuck inside her, and then she cries and all the hairballs of her emotions get kicked loose and after it she feels better. She is better.

I’ve got a new job. Not the one at the office — that one’s a cakewalk in comparison. Photo ops and fundraising, pencil-pushing, desk-jockeying bullshit — how does that even count as work? I can’t wait till they get those super-smart Terminator robots who can take all the shit jobs and just do ‘em. Yeah, they might rise up and kill everyone, but man, it’d be worth the risk so long as I never have to file another goddamn quarterly report.

But the new job I’m talking about? Daddy. Did not see that one coming. I always thought if I was gonna be a father, at least I’d get to have the good part first, y’know? The sweaty, dirty, roll in the hay and the little oops-I-forgot-my-pill-but-keep-going-anyway part. The part that makes the eighteen-year prison sentence seem like the crime might be worth it, if you know what I’m saying.

No, what I got is I got extended and indefinite caretaking duties of my Sister- and Brother-in-Law’s kids: a teenage boy and a baby girl. Call me Papa.

Hard to believe it, but I have not always been the paragon of moral rectitude you see before you today. Back in the day, ladies and gents, I was young and some would say I was wild. Drank too much shitty beer and threw up in the bushes. Drank too much shitty tequila and threw up under the table. Got in fights; got in trouble.

Then I started on my illustrious career as a law enforcement officer, met my then-girlfriend-now-wife. And it got a little harder to find the good reasons to drive with my buddies into the desert with a cooler of Bud for a ‘lost weekend.’ Big dog started getting tame. And I didn’t like it. My buddies would say I was keeping my balls in my girlfriend’s panty drawer, and I couldn’t really argue with them.

So around that time, I had this thing, this Junior Agent deal. One of those ‘team-building’ things where they send you off on a junket on the company dime supposedly to learn something or do something, but really it’s just a way to get everyone out of the office and talking like human beings. It works, too: you share a steak with someone, you go a little further out of your way to make sure they stay alive. It’s that simple.

Anyway, they sent us to beautiful Laughlin, Nevada — the fat-, poor-, ugly man’s Vegas. I guess it was cheap. So we sat through some lectures, talked tactical, ‘new’ interdiction strategies (find the crap and take it). That was about three hours of the day. The rest of the time was at the tables or some watering hole. So the crux of the story, here, is that I was hanging out a lot with some agents I don’t usually and the old urge to get rowdy was coming back hard. Why not? 500 mile rule in effect; what happens in fat-poor-ugly-man’s Vegas stays in fat-poor-ugly-man’s Vegas, right? Yeah, you can see where this is headed: trouble.

Here’s a new one on me; how are you supposed to feel when your boss gets shitcanned? Because mine just got shown the door. Not fired, per se, but asked ever-so-nice, pretty-please-with-just-do-it-already-on-top, to resign.

I never had a problem with the man. Not personally. Sure, as a boss, because bosses as a species are sickly animals. He was no different. Didn’t know his left hand was wiping his ass unless his right hand was handing him a properly formatted report about it. But all in all, he wasn’t a bad man. I don’t think, at least. Let’s put it this way: I’d be genuinely surprised if one day they catch him with his hands down the pants of some hooker in a Pokemon costume or somesuch. He ain’t perfect, but you turn a man who’s a Law Enforcement Officer into a mid-level bureaucrat and what do you expect to happen? He’s not got gonna get better at stopping bad guys; he’s gonna get better at pushing paper.

I’m not gonna get into the he-said, she-said reasons why it went down. You can speculate all you want. Me, I don’t want to speak ill of the departed.

One time, when I was like nine-ten, my family took a trip to Chi-town. Christmas time, visiting some cousin or uncle, I don’t remember. It was family but it wasn’t close. Anyway, it snowed and blowed like you wouldn’t believe. Colder than a witch’s hoo-hah, which is an order of magnitude more frigid than her tit, if you see what I’m saying. So we’re walking the street and everyone’s hustling as fast as they can to do whatever they have to do and get back inside. Except, can you believe it, near an L stop, there’s an organ grinder: big parka, squeezebox at his feet, waiting for someone to toss him a quarter.

This guy’s standing with his monkey on his shoulder. If you’ve never seen a monkey shivering, man, you haven’t seen pathetic. And this jizzstain is not only keeping the thing out in the snow, he’s making it smoke for him. Like holding the cigarette in his monkeypaws and putting it to the dude’s lips as he puffs, so he won’t have to take his hands out of his pockets. But I’m not impressed by that. I think the whole thing is too cool and I want to see the monkey do a trick. Swing from the lamppost. Play the squeezebox. Something. So I ask the guy and he doesn’t even say anything. Just pokes at the money jar with his boot. And I’m a kid, but I get it: money makes the monkey dance.

It’s a good lesson for being in law enforcement. If you’re ever trying to figure out why something horrible happened–some nightmare thing that makes you think God’s got the same sense of humor as Hitler–nine times out of ten the answer’s money. Some chick pimping her ten-year-old daughter for meth. Some teenage gangbanger cuts the fingers off a kid trying to take his corner. Money: it’s always money, somehow or another. I mean, I’m not a commie–I work too damned hard for every thing I got–but you gotta believe rich people don’t do that stuff. They have their own insane gerbil-rectum interactions with the wrong side of weird, sure. But they don’t go out and do the sickest shit, because they don’t need the money. That’s the truth.

Funny what a day can do. Thought I’d be taking a break from this blog thing for a while, but when you’re cock of the walk, you just gotta crow. You don’t argue with the wind when it’s blowing your way.

Ding, dong, the wicked witch is definitely dead. If you watch the news, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, go Google “nursing home” and “blows the hell up” and you’ll see what I mean. And who has two thumbs and was the only one without his head up his ass about a certain criminal/fast-food magnate? THIS guy. I know; I’m gloating and it’s bad form. I don’t even care. If you’re the guy who everyone thinks is crying wolf, it feels damn good when a big hairy wolf shows up and bites everyone right in the face. Damn good.

Well, mostly. I mean, yeah, right now my office is all lined up to kiss my white ass, but I have to admit it’s not sitting like I thought it would. I thought it’d be like getting one of those astronaut parades when you come back from the moon, but it doesn’t feel quite like that. I don’t know what it is.

There are multiple sides to any story. Take Walt’s brother-in-law, Hank. For him, Breaking Bad is not about the transformation of a chemistry teacher into a drug kingpin, but one of a DEA agent overcoming numerous obstacles in a noble pursuit of justice. (With a fair amount of wisecracks on the side.) If you haven’t yet gotten a close look at Hank’s Breaking Bad, now’s a great time to check it out via his personal blog, which has run on AMCtv.com for the past three seasons. Check out a sampling of excerpts below.

Sorry, guys. You’re gonna have to give me a moment here. It’s been, well, it’s been
effing crazy around here. I think… I mean, I’m not sure yet… It’s far too early to say,
and there’s just way too much shit to sift through, but maybe… just maybe… I was right.
Things have kinda, well, blown up around here. Yeah, and I may actually mean that
literally (the real literally, not that bullshit “literally” so favored by the elite brain trust
known as “reality TV stars”).